I need some ideas to rebuild a dot com bomb.

Ok Guys and Girls,

The site is http://www.forestknoll.com.
This is NOT an advertisment as the service isn't working properly, so don't sign up.

I built this about 6 years ago and at one stage I was earning quite a nice income off it. Then the effects of the dot.com bust came and business went downhill fast.

The domain itself still has PR (3) and has 1 dmoz entry, it is 6.5 years old, and has a few banklinks see http://www.iwebtool.com/www.forestknoll.com for more info.

When I started the service it was near the top of it's class in terms of features. Now most competitors are running sophisticated transaction flow monitoring services, which this isn't, nor will it ever be.

One idea I had is to fixup forestknoll so it just works again, give it away for free in return for a link on the monitored site allowing me to build up the PR to a much higher level and use forestknolll to pass PR to my other sites.

Can anyone else give me any ideas on what to do with the domain/site, i.e. scrap the service, build a new one, resell someone else's?

Any and all ideas will be entertained......

 

With such an aged domain, you could probably sell a few text links on the homepage for a few bucks a month

 

Does the site get any traffic? Google? Any good keywords? Would you be interested in selling, and if so, how much?


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Derek

 

Its a good idea, and agree you could probably sell some txt links depending on traffic

 

Traffic is minimal like a 100 uniques per month, but I think becuase of it's age and PR it could be jump started quickly just by some new content, but I don't really want to sell it.

Also I would like to do something big with it rather than just make a few bucks out of text links, so any other ideas on how to monetize it?

 

If you're interested in partnering with a network monitoring software vendor, contact me dkalweit at sensiblesoftware.com. We offer a robust COM API, which would enable you to run a completely automated network/website monitoring service quite easily. Thanks.


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Derek

 

Thanks, I will keep it in mind, but not at the moment. Forestknoll still works fine, it just needs the database taken care of and the file system cleaned up (I found 180k 20 byte files in /tmp!!)

 

You'll need to come up with more down-to-earth pricing, as well. ;-)


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Derek

 

That's why I was thinking of going to the free model.

They were the prices I used to get in 2001/2, we actually put the price up and got more business, but they are not realistic now of course.

 

Okay.

What's our competitive advantage?

1. Free or cheap.
2. I'm coming up blank here. We can say it's fairly commoditized so price is really the only necessary differentiator.

How are we going to gain market share

SEO?
On the plus side, the aged domain and dmoz links are an advantage over any new-entrant. Working against us is a very competitive field where a PR7 with 20K backlinks in MSN won't necessarily crack the front page for "website monitoring."

"Free website monitoring" is tough at the very top but the front page could probably be achieved without too much expense.

PPC?
Expect to pay over $5 per click on the general terms and about $.30 for "Free Website Monitoring".


You're paying for either and competing in a highly competitive landscape. If you offer the service for free to generate PR, even at $.30 per click, PPC isn't going to be profitable. If you are going for paying customers, succeeding without a competitive advantage and differentiator will obviously be a difficult and time consuming task.

You do have an aged domain with a dmoz listing. You might be able to get a decent price from the domain from a competitor in the space looking to improve their SEO.

 

Thanks for the good advice karated.

 

Sell your domain to me and then invest on your other sites

 

With that PR i would create a community, i.e. forum etc.

Like a zeropaid.com for your industry.